Under a DACA amnesty, American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill. About one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid. Since DACA’s inception under Obama, more than 2,100 illegal aliens have been kicked off the program after it was revealed that they were either criminals or gang members. JOHN BINDER

“Aside from the cruelty,
the greatest shock was to discover that tourists are unwittingly eating dog
meat and fueling the trade,” said an investigator from activist group Animals
Australia, identified only as Luke for his own safety.

“The average tourist coming
to Bali has no idea that ‘RW’ on the outside of popular street food stalls
indicates dog meat.”

Luke spent four months
undercover in the city’s dog meat trade, documenting gangs as they stole pups,
then brutally slaughtered them for food, the news outlet reports.

“As an animal cruelty
investigator, I have trained myself to cope with cruelty, but nothing prepared
me for the brutal catching of dogs in the village,”he told ABC’s “7:30”program.

“I focused on my camera
work but it was gut-wrenching to hear these dogs … screaming and wailing in
terror and sorrow.”

Dog meat is legal in the
country — although killing animals cruelly and serving poison meat are not —
and many locals willingly dine on the dish, which they believe makes men more
virile.

“It is good for health
especially during winter. It is good for breathing. It makes us strong,” one
60-year-old man told “7:30.”

But holidaymakers
sunning themselves on the beaches of the tourism hotspot are none the wiser
when they’re approached by a vendor selling what he insists is chicken.

“Satay chicken, not
dog?” an Australian tourist asks the peddler in a videotaped exchange.

“No, not dog,” he
replies.

“I’m happy just as long
as it’s not dog,” the Aussie says before chowing down on Fido.

The animal rights
activists are hoping Balinese authorities will crack down on the industry now
that they’ve exposed the poisoned meat entering the local food chain.

LIST OF CONSULATES GENERAL OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The following are the addresses of the Consulates General of the Republic of Indonesia in the United States of America and their jurisdictions. Applicant is strongly encouraged to apply for a consular service (visa/document legalization) at the nearest Consular Office to their residence.

Last week,
the US Treasury Department released the first of several reports on the 2010
Dodd-Frank “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.” The reports will
guide the Trump administration in rolling back the Obama-era legislation.

The proposed
changes to Dodd-Frank grant the major banks a wishlist of demands to strip out
most of the law’s minimal restrictions on their speculative activities. None of
the top bankers whose fraudulent and in many cases illegal activities triggered
the 2008 financial crash were prosecuted under Obama. Instead of serving long
prison sentences for sending the economy into the worst slump since the 1930s
and stripping tens of millions of people of their life savings, they were
granted even greater control over the US and world economy and allowed to add
billions more to their personal fortunes.

Now, under
Trump, the largely cosmetic reforms instituted under Obama are being removed by
an administration that includes Goldman Sachs alumni in top posts, including
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and embodies in its policies and personnel
the American financial oligarchy.

The Dodd-Frank Act was passed amid intense social anger over the
financial crash and multi-trillion-dollar government bailout of the banks. As
the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, Dodd-Frank
“was intended to shield the major financial institutions and regulatory
agencies from any substantive change while leading the public to think that the
predatory and illegal practices of Wall Street were being curbed.”

Not only did
the act not break up the big banks or impose limits on their size and power, it
failed to reinstate more serious limits on speculation, such as the 1930s
Glass-Steagall Act, or restrict derivatives trading and other forms of
financial gambling that fueled the 2008 financial collapse.

The major
provisions of the act, such as the requirement for big banks to draw up “living
wills,” the Volcker rule limiting commercial bank proprietary trading, and the
establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), imposed no
serious limits on the activities of Wall Street. Nevertheless, the financial
elite denounced them as intolerable infringements of its prerogatives and
lobbied furiously against them.

While the
Trump administration is moving to whittle down Dodd-Frank, the Republican
Financial Choice Act, passed by the House of Representatives on June 8, would
entirely repeal Dodd-Frank and allow the biggest banks to effectively avoid any
regulatory oversight if they can show that they have a certain amount of base
capital.

Mnuchin’s
initial recommendations would further water down the Volker Rule, which already
contains sufficient loopholes to permit major banks to continue carrying out
proprietary trading, i.e., using clients’ money to make investments in behalf
of the bank, rather than the clients.

Another
proposal would change how the “living wills” section of Dodd-Frank works,
reducing the frequency and severity of “stress tests” run by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation to ensure that major banks can withstand a new
financial crisis. The biggest banks would be allowed to forego the tests
altogether if they could show that they have a certain amount of unleveraged
capital.

Mnuchin’s
report also advocates changing how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is
financed. The CFPB was created for the nominal purpose of helping consumers
challenge fraudulent bank practices. Mnuchin’s proposal would defund the
organization by making it reliant on congressional budget funds, effectively
putting it on the chopping block. At present, it works through the Federal
Reserve Board.

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS: THEIR GLOBAL LOOTING of the
POOR

*

THE OPEN BORDERS PARTY of GEORGE SOROS, HILLARY
& BILLARY CLINTON, BARACK OBAMA and DONALD TRUMP

The American oligarchy, steeped in
criminality and parasitism, can produce only a government of war, social
reaction and repression. In its blind avarice, it is creating the conditions
for unprecedented social upheavals. It is hurtling toward its own revolutionary
demise at the hands of the working class.

“As president, Obama not
only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a
single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and
swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and
he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out
firms.”

“So
when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013,
while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other
Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man
who belonged in prison.”

The NARCOMEX drug cartels now
operate in all major American cities and haul back to NARCOMEX between $40 top
$60 BILLION from sales of HEROIN!

A report issued Tuesday by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) shows that there were 1.27 million emergency room visits or inpatient stays for opioid-related issues in 2014, the latest year for which there is sufficient data. This represents a 64 percent increase for inpatient care and a 99 percent hike in emergency room treatment compared to figures from 2005.

Aside from the overall skyrocketing of hospital visits, the report found that the previous discrepancy between males and females in the rate of opioid-related inpatient stays in 2005 has disappeared. The rate of female hospital visits has now caught up to that of males.

Another significant finding is that from 2005 to 2014, the age groups with the highest rate of opioid-related inpatient stays nationally were 25–44 and 45–64 years—in other words, adults in their prime working years, not adolescents. The highest rate of opioid-related Emergency Department (ED) visits was among those aged 25–44 years.

This mirrors another recent report, which found that death rates have risen among the same age group, 25–44, in every racial and ethnic group and almost all states since 2010, likely driven in part by the opioid epidemic.

Using a patient’s area code to estimate the income range of people affected, the researchers were also able to report on differences between the rich and the poor. The results showed that rates of hospital admission or emergency room visits were higher in poorer neighborhoods, but that the increases were uniform, between 75 percent and 85 percent over the 10-year period, across all income ranges.

At the top of the national list for inpatient opioid care is Maryland, which recorded nearly 404 admissions per 100,000 residents. The state, which has been rocked by the epidemic in recent years largely due to the spread of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, has seen a quadrupling of opioid-related deaths since 2010. Baltimore City alone saw 694 deaths from drug and alcohol-related overdoses in 2016—nearly two a day.

Following Maryland, the top 10 states with the highest rate of opioid-related hospital admissions in 2014 were Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, West Virginia, Connecticut, Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Maine.

There was substantial state-to-state variation in the findings. States such as Texas, Nebraska and Iowa, for example, are reporting substantially lower rates of hospital admissions than others, which coincides with the unevenness between states in the number of overdose deaths in 2016.

This unevenness may reflect, in part, the ways in which the more potent opioid, fentanyl, has spread throughout the country. The historical divide in the nation’s heroin market between powdered heroin in the East and black tar heroin from Mexico in the West means that fentanyl has been somewhat restricted to certain areas, particularly in the Appalachian and Northeast region.

This does not mean that the opioid epidemic is less severe in the areas with lower hospital visits and deaths rates, only perhaps less deadly. If drug production and distribution makes a shift in the West from black tar to powdered heroin, there will likely be a rise in the use of fentanyl along with it, and consequently the death toll would rise to East Coast levels.

Additionally, the lower rate of hospital visits in rural areas is often due to a lack of access to medical care. Rural areas have even fewer resources to deal with the drug epidemic than their urban neighbors.

Katherine, who works for a nonprofit effort in rural Michigan relating to substance abuse, spoke to WSWS reporters about the unique challenges that face rural areas: “I work in a small rural community with quite a significant opiate crisis just as it is in urban areas. In our county, we don’t have any treatment options. We have one clinic that is limited in what they can do, and it is always at capacity. They [addicts] have to go out of county for treatment, which is about 90 miles away, and there is typically a wait list in these places that are all in major cities. Every place is pretty much running at max capacity all the time.”

If users decide they need help in a rural town it is very likely they will have to wait 72 hours or more before they can get a bed in a rehab, or in a detox facility. Katherine commented on the further challenges that this poses to addicts seeking recovery help: “Around here, if they [a user] are at a point when they are ready—which is a big step and where they often feel very vulnerable—they are basically told to continue using at their regular dosage until something opens up. ... To be told something like that I think makes them lose hope that there is a way out of addiction.”

The obstacles facing workers in the cities are different, but no less severe. Laura, who works in an adult intensive care unit (ICU) in Boston, told the WSWS: “Honestly, one of the hardest things is, even when patients bring themselves in, they have a tendency while detoxing to become verbally or psychologically abusive out of desperation. A detox that ends up in the ICU, which is usually alcoholics because the DTs are life-threatening, is a lot of work. With understaffing in hospitals being what it is, it’s kind of a nightmare.”

Most hospitals do not have options for patients who wish to detox. Some doctors are actually authorized to prescribe patients an additional drug called suboxone to help with the symptoms. However, without support and supervision this treatment option often proves to be a futile and even dangerous one. Reports of suboxone abuse, and even overdoses, have spiked significantly since the onset of the crisis.

Laura explained the limitations that exist even for hospitals that provide resources for detox: “We have a detox unit. But it can’t do much for patients who are acutely withdrawing. If they score over a certain number on the scales that we use, they get transferred to the regular hospital units. And we don’t have addiction training. … Addicts are a underserved and vulnerable population.”

Health care workers in both rural and urban areas express frustration over the seemingly endless crisis. The sheer breadth of the opioid epidemic is astounding. It has bled into nearly every major social challenge of the day, putting a strain not only on hospital and emergency workers, but also on social welfare programs, the education system, mental health facilities, child care workers and more. This creates a situation where the drug epidemic, itself the product of a diseased social order, becomes a major contributor to its further decay.

The capitalist system as a whole is the source of the drug abuse epidemic, as any combination of the various strands of social ills affecting an individual could lead to substance abuse and addiction. The scope of the crisis represents a very complex manifestation of the problems created by a society in which every aspect of life is subjugated to private profit and where only an infinitesimal fraction of the resources available are directed to meet social need.

Katherine in Michigan touched on this reality in her comments to the WSWS: “I think that there are so many people who are suffering, experiencing poverty and extreme hardship, or who are encountering prejudice and oppression, and these factors are all compounding to create the basis for the drug epidemic to flourish. It is such a multifaceted issue. People are feeling extremely helpless watching the events in society and the political situation, and it is almost like a building up of unrest underneath the surface.”

US hospital visits due to opioid issues top one million a year

By Genevieve Leigh21 June 2017

A report issued Tuesday by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) shows that there were 1.27 million emergency room visits or inpatient stays for opioid-related issues in 2014, the latest year for which there is sufficient data. This represents a 64 percent increase for inpatient care and a 99 percent hike in emergency room treatment compared to figures from 2005.

Aside from the overall skyrocketing of hospital visits, the report found that the previous discrepancy between males and females in the rate of opioid-related inpatient stays in 2005 has disappeared. The rate of female hospital visits has now caught up to that of males.

Another significant finding is that from 2005 to 2014, the age groups with the highest rate of opioid-related inpatient stays nationally were 25–44 and 45–64 years—in other words, adults in their prime working years, not adolescents. The highest rate of opioid-related Emergency Department (ED) visits was among those aged 25–44 years.

This mirrors another recent report, which found that death rates have risen among the same age group, 25–44, in every racial and ethnic group and almost all states since 2010, likely driven in part by the opioid epidemic.

Using a patient’s area code to estimate the income range of people affected, the researchers were also able to report on differences between the rich and the poor. The results showed that rates of hospital admission or emergency room visits were higher in poorer neighborhoods, but that the increases were uniform, between 75 percent and 85 percent over the 10-year period, across all income ranges.

At the top of the national list for inpatient opioid care is Maryland, which recorded nearly 404 admissions per 100,000 residents. The state, which has been rocked by the epidemic in recent years largely due to the spread of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, has seen a quadrupling of opioid-related deaths since 2010. Baltimore City alone saw 694 deaths from drug and alcohol-related overdoses in 2016—nearly two a day.

Following Maryland, the top 10 states with the highest rate of opioid-related hospital admissions in 2014 were Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, West Virginia, Connecticut, Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Maine.

There was substantial state-to-state variation in the findings. States such as Texas, Nebraska and Iowa, for example, are reporting substantially lower rates of hospital admissions than others, which coincides with the unevenness between states in the number of overdose deaths in 2016.

This unevenness may reflect, in part, the ways in which the more potent opioid, fentanyl, has spread throughout the country. The historical divide in the nation’s heroin market between powdered heroin in the East and black tar heroin from Mexico in the West means that fentanyl has been somewhat restricted to certain areas, particularly in the Appalachian and Northeast region.

This does not mean that the opioid epidemic is less severe in the areas with lower hospital visits and deaths rates, only perhaps less deadly. If drug production and distribution makes a shift in the West from black tar to powdered heroin, there will likely be a rise in the use of fentanyl along with it, and consequently the death toll would rise to East Coast levels.

Additionally, the lower rate of hospital visits in rural areas is often due to a lack of access to medical care. Rural areas have even fewer resources to deal with the drug epidemic than their urban neighbors.

Katherine, who works for a nonprofit effort in rural Michigan relating to substance abuse, spoke to WSWS reporters about the unique challenges that face rural areas: “I work in a small rural community with quite a significant opiate crisis just as it is in urban areas. In our county, we don’t have any treatment options. We have one clinic that is limited in what they can do, and it is always at capacity. They [addicts] have to go out of county for treatment, which is about 90 miles away, and there is typically a wait list in these places that are all in major cities. Every place is pretty much running at max capacity all the time.”

If users decide they need help in a rural town it is very likely they will have to wait 72 hours or more before they can get a bed in a rehab, or in a detox facility. Katherine commented on the further challenges that this poses to addicts seeking recovery help: “Around here, if they [a user] are at a point when they are ready—which is a big step and where they often feel very vulnerable—they are basically told to continue using at their regular dosage until something opens up. ... To be told something like that I think makes them lose hope that there is a way out of addiction.”

The obstacles facing workers in the cities are different, but no less severe. Laura, who works in an adult intensive care unit (ICU) in Boston, told the WSWS: “Honestly, one of the hardest things is, even when patients bring themselves in, they have a tendency while detoxing to become verbally or psychologically abusive out of desperation. A detox that ends up in the ICU, which is usually alcoholics because the DTs are life-threatening, is a lot of work. With understaffing in hospitals being what it is, it’s kind of a nightmare.”

Most hospitals do not have options for patients who wish to detox. Some doctors are actually authorized to prescribe patients an additional drug called suboxone to help with the symptoms. However, without support and supervision this treatment option often proves to be a futile and even dangerous one. Reports of suboxone abuse, and even overdoses, have spiked significantly since the onset of the crisis.

Laura explained the limitations that exist even for hospitals that provide resources for detox: “We have a detox unit. But it can’t do much for patients who are acutely withdrawing. If they score over a certain number on the scales that we use, they get transferred to the regular hospital units. And we don’t have addiction training. … Addicts are a underserved and vulnerable population.”

Health care workers in both rural and urban areas express frustration over the seemingly endless crisis. The sheer breadth of the opioid epidemic is astounding. It has bled into nearly every major social challenge of the day, putting a strain not only on hospital and emergency workers, but also on social welfare programs, the education system, mental health facilities, child care workers and more. This creates a situation where the drug epidemic, itself the product of a diseased social order, becomes a major contributor to its further decay.

The capitalist system as a whole is the source of the drug abuse epidemic, as any combination of the various strands of social ills affecting an individual could lead to substance abuse and addiction. The scope of the crisis represents a very complex manifestation of the problems created by a society in which every aspect of life is subjugated to private profit and where only an infinitesimal fraction of the resources available are directed to meet social need.

Katherine in Michigan touched on this reality in her comments to the WSWS: “I think that there are so many people who are suffering, experiencing poverty and extreme hardship, or who are encountering prejudice and oppression, and these factors are all compounding to create the basis for the drug epidemic to flourish. It is such a multifaceted issue. People are feeling extremely helpless watching the events in society and the political situation, and it is almost like a building up of unrest underneath the surface.”